The CIA calls it ‘blowback’, when the unintended consequences of what seemed like a good policy at the time come back to bite you. The classic example is Western sponsorship of radical Islamist fighters against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. That covert war against the Kremlin was a significant factor in crippling Communism in Russia which was a good thing, surely? It certainly seemed cost-free for America — until that bright morning of September 11, 2001, when Afghan-based...

NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell and Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) had a bizarre encounter yesterday when a man dressed only in a bra and panties rushed then near Black Lives Matter Square and the area claimed earlier as the “Black House Autonomous Zone.” Mitchell immediately asked “where’s the police” and Norton added “where’s the police when you need them?” It is a question that many of us have been asking D.C. officials for weeks as police have stood by and watched statues...

Near the top at a Dallas County, Texas government COVID-19 web page, just below a link people can click on to find out about a “job opportunity” in the county’s new “contact tracing” surveillance program begun in the name of countering coronavirus, there is a chart titled “TODAY’S COVID-19 RISK LEVEL.” Lit up is the highest risk level on the chart, appearing on a red background: “STAY HOME STAY SAFE.” You can see other governments across America promoting a similar message of fear at their...

I’ll bet most Americans don’t know who Pol Pot was. Pol Pot was a Marxist-Leninist, a student of Mao, and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea from 1963 to 1981. He turned Cambodia into a one-party dictatorship. He dreamed of converting his country into an agrarian socialist society he believed would evolve into a communist society. In order to realize that objective, millions were forced to toil in the countryside. “Bad elements” and “New People”—intellectuals, government...

In a sign that the Federal Reserve is growing increasingly desperate to jump-start the economy, the Fed’s Secondary Market Credit Facility has begun purchasing individual corporate bonds. The Secondary Market Credit Facility was created by Congress as part of a coronavirus stimulus bill to purchase as much as 750 billion dollars of corporate credit. Until last week, the Secondary Market Credit Facility had limited its purchases to exchange-traded funds, which are bundled groups of stocks or...

As Donald Trump prepares for his first political rally in months, Liberals are hand-wringing over the event, saying it will be a coronavirus “super spreader.” Where were such fears just days ago, amid massive anti-police protests? Oh, what a difference a Black Lives Matter protest, and a Trump political rally in an election year, can make. As destructive as the Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa protests may have been, they did carry, for one faint moment, a silver lining: America seemed to...

Plexiglass. They put up plexiglass between us. This may not turn out well. Allow me to explain. On Monday, June 16, I was finally given government permission to return to the gymnasium that I had been affiliated with for over two decades. It actually is a satellite branch built in a large warehouse separate from the main facility. This smaller, “grittier” gym has more free weights to lift, tires to flip, and heavy bags to punch. I go for the boxing. I also go for the people. The desk staff...

Texas Governor Greg Abbot, in an April 27 executive order concerning coronavirus, declared: “Individuals are encouraged to wear appropriate face coverings, but no jurisdiction can impose a civil or criminal penalty for failure to wear a face covering.” This executive order provision stopped in their tracks local governments that sought to enforce mask mandates as part of their coronavirus crackdowns. Because of his stand against mask mandates, Abbott gained praise for defending liberty. But,...

President Trump's former national security advisor John Bolton's "tell all" book is to be released today over strong objections - and threats of prosecution - from the president. The picture Bolton paints of Trump in leaked excerpts is unflattering in the extreme - to the point of appearing almost petty. Was Bolton Trump's biggest mistake? Also in today's Liberty Report...villain of the week! Watch today's Liberty Report:

On June 8 Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of the US-NATO military alliance, gave a speech at NATO’s new billion dollar headquarters in Brussels. It was followed by a selection of patsy questions, but in spite of the trite predictability of Stoltenberg’s statements and the eager friendliness of the questioners, enough was said to indicate that NATO is still on the lookout for enemies to attempt to justify its continuing shaky existence. New on the Stoltenberg list is China, which is a...

I don't get out much. I joke that my husband and I have been "sheltering in place" for the past thirteen years, ever since our son was born. So it had been a while since I'd been out to a grocery store. Since the beginning of "all this", in fact. But this morning our daughter had a bad seizure,  we used our last Diastat on her, and I had to go to the pharmacy to get more.  I was prepared for what I would see, but not for what I felt. Everyone was wearing masks–not like on the streets in our...

An internal CIA report about the Vault 7 fiasco paints a damning picture of the main US spy agency. WikiLeaks released the CIA’s hacking tools, likely leaked by an insider, while CIA chiefs were too busy cooking up Russiagate. Vault 7 was the name given to cyber attack tools developed by the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), and published by WikiLeaks in March 2017. It was the largest data breach in Langley’s history, with long-lasting consequences. For example, Chinese cybersecurity...

Google has moved against another set of conservative sites. While many have celebrated the action against ZeroHedge and The Federalist, I remain deeply concerned over the free speech implications of such actions. I have written for years about public and private censorship, including recent actions to regulate and control speech on the Internet. Democratic leaders have been calling for censorship on the Internet and in social media for years, a move that will destroy the greatest forum for...

Four years ago today, on June 15, 2016, a shadowy Internet persona calling itself “Guccifer 2.0” appeared out of nowhere to claim credit for hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee on behalf of WikiLeaks and implicate Russia by dropping “telltale” but synthetically produced Russian “breadcrumbs” in his metadata. Thanks largely to the corporate media, the highly damaging story actually found in those DNC emails — namely, that the DNC had stacked the cards against Bernie Sanders in...

“Revolutions are often seen as spontaneous. It looks like people just went into the street. But it’s the result of months or years of preparation. It is very boring until you reach a certain point, where you can organize mass demonstrations or strikes. If it is carefully planned, by the time they start, everything is over in a matter of weeks.” Foreign Policy Journal Does anyone believe the nationwide riots and looting are a spontaneous reaction to the killing of George Floyd? It’s all too...

While tens of millions of Americans have seen their jobs disappear due to the "stay-at-home" coronavirus shutdown, the military contractor industry is moving to grab tens of billions to reimburse workers put on leave during the crisis. The actual private sector may never recover, but the military-industrial complex is eager to get back to the "old normal" of massive spending on an unsustainable US global military empire. Watch today's Liberty Report: